States, districts, and schools that want to realize how competency-based education (CBE) can directly support students’ college and career readiness must examine the quality of implementation of core CBE features. The CBE 360 Survey Toolkit uses surveys from a recent AIR CBE study to provide a comprehensive picture of CBE implementation in six research-based core areas

To improve graduation rates, districts and schools need clear, evidence-based information about the impact of dropout prevention strategies. Check & Connect is a mentoring program designed to promote positive outcomes (including student engagement, progress and persistence, and school completion) through the provision of continuous, individualized student support. This research brief describes a longitudinal study of Check & Connect in a large, urban district in California.

The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes found that students attending network high schools with a mature and well-implemented approach to promoting deeper learning experienced different instructional strategies, greater opportunities, and better results on a range of outcomes than did their matched counterparts in comparison sites. This brief examines how teachers’ own beliefs about teaching, their assessment of their peers’ professional culture, and their assessment of the success of the principal in providing instructional leadership and program coherence are related to students’ reports of deeper learning opportunities in their classes.

The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes assessed whether students who attended high schools that focused on deeper learning got more opportunities for deeper learning and whether they had better outcomes than students in comparison high schools. In an updated set of analyses from the study, AIR found that students who attended high schools focused on deeper learning were more likely to enroll in four-year institutions and in college in general than their peers who attended comparison schools.

Can deeper learning approaches lead to higher graduation rates? Consistent with the findings from the original Study of Deeper Learning, newly completed analyses find a graduation rate advantage of 8 percentage points for students in participating deeper learning network high schools compared with similar students in matched non-network high schools.

The extreme levels of debt accrued by students pursuing postsecondary degrees has been identified as one of the nation’s most worrisome educational issues. About 90 percent of STEM Ph.D. recipients funded their graduate education through primarily institutional sources. In contrast, 65 percent of those with a doctorate in the social, behavioral and economic sciences did.